155 An Examination of Titillation: Adult Comics & My Gradual Appreciation For Them

by Jay Bodnar

I would like to start by saying this is my third attempt at writing this article. My first two aborted attempts were unusable, because I kept straying away from the topic, which if you don’t know by the headliner is about adult comics, erotic comics, porn.

My first attempt was useless because what started as an article turned quickly into a very judgmental rant about how I hate most people who read comics, and how odd it is to genuinely love something that draws people who repel you to your very soul to the same medium. This comes from a stint of working at a comic shop for a good chunk of a year, and daily realizing how much I honestly despise most of you (not you, dear reader, but let’s say everyone else.)  But I then decided this is an article worthy of itself, so that I don’t feel pressured to spare any details.

My second attempt got sidelined into my thoughts on other Pornography, or you know, actual people fucking. Which of course I’ll have to address at least a little, I just don’t want it to override my main objective.

So first and foremost, I like porn comics. I feel saying it in many circles immediately condemns you to being looked at as a perv, or a clueless twit that doesn’t GET what comics are on some level. And in a way, I understand where this comes from. I only recently in the last year or so opened up and admitted to liking them myself. I had in all honesty a kind of harsh view on them previously. Mostly because it seemed like most of the people I met who read them were “off”, as people. At the comic shop I worked at, two people come to mind: the first is a guy, mid forties, who is just a wreck. He has some crazy skin issues on his face, doesn’t shower, every time he walked in I, for half a second, thought a homeless man had walked in off the street. When he would get his hands on any adult comics, his eyes would bug out. He became deathly silent and leered at them with as intense a look a person could muster. If for some bizarre reason I would ever have needed to ask for the comics back before he was done (like for say, if some parents came in with their children and I didn’t want them to be scared by the apparently homeless man with the mild erection and murder stare) I am half certain we would have ripped my arm from my bloody socket.

The second guy was this shithead yuppie who would only come in to buy toys for his half-wit offspring. He would talk shit on comics in general, and then ask to see the adult comics. Which to me means he obviously doesn’t understand art, or emotion through art (which I will talk about soon) but found another way to be a scumbag and get a porn fix while simultaneously buying his child toys. I’m betting the comics he bought were put in the same pile as some horribly illegal German porn that’s stashed in his rape dungeon that I’m sure I’ll read about any day now in the paper.

If before this year you were to ask me what kind of guys read adult comics, I would have given you these two men as examples. Now I guess I’ll give you a third example: myself. Late last year I was with this girl, and while discussing comics she had an open love of porn comics. She loved pictures of people fucking. She liked comics in other genres as well; she honestly was a pretty rounded person. Anyway, as a Christmas gift I purchased her “Best of Erotic comics 09’” by Last Gasp publishing. I figured I support the comic industry, it’s definitely a gift book (which I define as a book you would like to own but not necessarily purchase) and as we’d had an hour or so long conversation about it (not the trade by Last Gasp, but the idea of adult comics) a couple of weeks earlier, so it would also show that I had a grasp on that which many women complain of men — that we don’t pay attention.

We had a completely apocalyptic meltdown in our relationship/ friendship before Christmas so I ended up with some additional gifts in my house she never received. A couple of my friends benefited from her loss as they received some of them. However, I felt a smidge uncomfortable handing off the adult comics collection trade, so I resigned myself to just holding onto it. I have a mild case of OCD and it manifests itself in really weird ways. One way, and I am glad for this, is that I am unable to put a book (or CD or DVD) on the shelf without having read it first. It makes me feel like a poser. In my head I know there are people with overflowing bookshelves and they maybe read a third of the books, they just like the impression people get of them when walking into their den, without having done the work to deserve it. This is what my OCD tells me, anyway.

So I read the collection and found myself really connecting to a couple of the pieces within it. And because I’m sometimes introspective, I needed to readjust my views of adult comics. I figure besides the fear of being compared to the guys I mentioned earlier in this writing (although to be honest, I hate the idea of being compared to most people who read comics anyways. It always makes me laugh to hear anyone defend comic readers with the idea that at this point it’s cliché to even remotely compare most readers to, oh fuck it, that comic book guy from The Simpsons. I will be honest with you, if you’re cool and you read comics, you’re the minority. It’s a great minority to be in, but we need to stop defending the rest. And if it makes you feel better, if you take any segment of society and break it down by numbers, no matter where you look, no matter what culture or interests, most people are not worth defending. So don’t think I’m picking on comic culture too much, this is just my view on the entire population of the planet).

So barring my fear of judgment from the unknown masses: what, if any, reason is there for me not to enjoy erotic comics? Like I said, upon reading the collection, I really related to some of the pieces. I think the best comics on the market no matter how wildly fantastic or otherworldly have always been the ones willing to go to an emotional level that we can all understand. Be it hatred, humor, fear or love. I’m willing to bet (or I’m hoping, at least) most the comics that have moved you are the ones that made an impact on you on one of those levels. And yes, I know sometimes it’s nice to just take in a big action scene without consequence, but I would debate that even this fulfills a need we have in us all, the occasional need for anarchy in a controlled society. That, to me, still falls under the “fear” category of emotion and serves the purpose.

If we didn’t need releases for these things, fiction wouldn’t exist. And I really think erotic fiction serves a very important function. People need a way to explore their sexuality in a non-harmful way, it helps them constantly recognize needs they may have, and hopefully opens up conversation with you and your partner (or partners; who am I to judge other lifestyles?) that can only better your life if handled correctly. I think people who bottle up their sexuality and sexual desires tend to erupt in completely embarrassing and/or dangerous ways.

So if not moral, is it because adult comics aren’t very good? Well, comics aren’t very good. And what I mean by that is every month Previews solicits hundreds of super-hero based comics. Hundreds. How many of them are good? Honestly good, not just treading water because you have a fascination with a character. Maybe a handful. It can be said for all genres: how many crime books are being published, and how many of them are good? Horror, romance, adventure, science fiction? They all fall into the same tropes. A lot of people want to make comics, but a lot of people shouldn’t be making comics. So now when I hear people say adult comics are shitty… well, yeah. There are a lot of shitty comics. That just makes the good ones stick out more. When something rises above the rest, no matter what genre, should it no be celebrated?

I was trying to think of where my aversion to them started. It’s illogical, at least in my reading history. The first comic I ever read was Mad Magazine, followed by Groo the Wanderer (The Sergio Aragones connection, I’m sure), which lead to The Savage Sword of Conan then Elfquest and then at some point Fantastic Four, because visually I was fascinated by The Thing (still am– what wonderful design.) Anyway, while not outright porn, all of the above (minus The Fantastic Four) were fairly sexually charged. Mad Magazine had tons of sex puns in every issue. Groo, even if it was in a more “cartoon-y” manner, still had scantily dressed women in almost every issue. (Aragones specializes in two forms of breasts: either droopy and sock like, or perfectly cylindrical. Apparently there was some barbarian plastic surgeon on an epic quest as well. Maybe magic was implemented?) Conan was basically an axe wielding rapist or being seduced by some half model/half snake creature at any given point, and Elfquest very maturely explored sex and relationships.

As a young kid, I LOVED that about them, too. I remember thinking how I had found a secret reading that kind of made me more grown up. And, now that I think of it, it was true. I honestly can’t figure out when I started not thinking like that? Maybe it was because I ended up reading a lot of really bad superhero comics as I got older. Those topics seem to be very rarely addressed in those books populated with girls with huge tits and men dressed in skin-tight spandex. You’d think it would have been a given.

Or maybe those comics were the problem? It seems to me that every time sexuality was addressed in superhero comics, they were so badly done, so painstakingly immature, sexist and just plain badly written, that maybe I got used to the idea that this topic should just be avoided in general. At some point as a reader, very real emotions and needs seemed to be replaced by very unreal streaks of vendettas, being a bad ass, and bizarre human anatomy. Instead of a splash of cum you got a ray blast to the face.

I guess the last argument to be made against adult comics is the “porn” argument. Detractors can easily lump them in with other porn. You can find very adamant supporters and critics of porn easily, and it’s much too simple to come up with statistics to support your view, or at least to make the statistics say what you want them to say. Also, nothing I say for or against is going to change your already made up decision on it. I understand that porn can be dangerous, in that we lose our sensitivity to other people, and by we, I of course mean “men”. Men are the only ones stupid enough to watch porn and have it actually leak into your real world encounters. The idea that violently shoving your fingers into a vagina is wanted, or that by giving cunnilingus by rapidly shaking your head back and forth between legs is the correct way to do it, and when getting a blow job the girl should be moaning with ecstasy (why would she? Nothing’s happening to her —  she’s basically doing you a favor) and a ton of other falsities that come with the unintelligent men who watch porn. There are books written on the topic, so this is a quaint observation at best. The worst case — no strike that — a common fear is that it starts to delegate a healthy aspect of our lives into an unhealthy one. I think it can lead to people objectifying humans, which as we all know isn’t a good thing.

That’s for people whom it affects that way. There are plenty of people who have a good relationship with porn as well. They aren’t sex creeps, or dangerous, they just understand it’s an aspect of sexuality to explore if they choose. I didn’t want to come off as bashing porn. Because I also think porn serves an even greater function in society that many people disregard. It stands as a wall to the morality that many religions would happily forcefully subject society to; the religions that gleefully wish we were a theocracy instead of a secular democratic society. I think the only real warning I can give, is that of common sense. Too much of anything can destroy you.

But! (see how easy it is to get distracted?) should you even view adult comics in the same way you view other porn? First off, the most radical difference is involvement, meaning no humans other than the person writing and drawing the comic and you reading it are involved. There are no morals to take into consideration, you don’t have to ponder the life choices good or bad that lead to a person decided to fuck another in front of a camera, in front of a crew and then finally in front of you. There is only the page and emotion. You really should be able to freely allow yourself to enjoy whatever it may bring on you. If you read it and feel nothing, then it wasn’t for you. You don’t need to justify it, or fight it, because like I said before, the only people involved are yourself, and the artist that created it. You don’t have to quantify the societal ramifications it may or may not have. Mostly because two people don’t constitute a society.

Lastly: it’s still art. You can appreciate it on that level. Nudes and art, sex and art, have been there since the beginning. And really, how can you appreciate comics and not art in general? Why would you want to hold back comics from reaching the same plateau as all other arts? I’ve heard people in the shop talk shit on artists I consider geniuses that don’t happen to make traditional art, such as Ashley Wood. “That’s not what comic art is to me, it just looks stupid in a comic.” I say, fuck that! In my mind the only difference between Egon Schiele and Ashley Wood is that Egon Schiele never paired his nudes with giant robots. But it’s the same god damn thing: ART!!!

So those are my views on why I hope more adult comics (good ones, anyways) start getting made. It’s not something to be hidden. If anything it shows that you just have a wider and more human appreciation for the arts. I think that a good way to break the ice would be if some industrious editor somewhere put together an adult compilation trade with amazing artists that don’t normally do adult comics and let them go at it. My wish list for the non existing editor and publisher for artists would be:

Eric Powell, Mike Allred, Becky Cloonan, Steve Mannion, Johnny Ace, Rafa Garres, Paul Pope, Sean Phillips, Ryan Ottley, Jill Thompson, Tony Milionare, Sergio Aragones, David Mazzucchelli, Jaime Hernandez, Jason, Wendy Pini, Matt Wagner, Mike Mignola (weird, blocky genitals), Doug Tennapel, Richard Corben, Amy Reeder Hadley, Jordi Bernet, John Cassaday, James Stokoe, Brandon Graham, Gabriel Ba, Fabio Moon and Farel Dalrymple.

I mean, who wouldn’t buy that? Who? Then, everybody would have a porn comic in their collection, which would just be the start of better things in general. I mean, if you own a porn trade, why not a crime trade? And so on, and so on? And how could you not defend having it if all the above talent was involved? You couldn’t, you would be a fool.

But since the above doesn’t exist, I hope you now at least might take the chance and check some out if they so interest you, and if they do, you can do so without any second thoughts as to the validity of doing so. It’s just comics, and if it’s a good one, you shouldn’t ever have to explain it– it justifies itself.

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Writer’s notes

1.I know that some of the artists in that little list I made have already done some adult comics, I just felt like naming artists I respect, regardless.

2. I like when people tell whats going on when they write. It’s a good trend. So in the two hours it took me to write this I listened to these three albums.

D.O.A.- Hardcore 81

Dan Sartain – Dan Sartain Lives

The Cramps – A Date With Elvis

3. Got any good recommendations? I’d love to hear them.

4.Want me to review your book? Contact the site for my mailing address.